flâneur

Harihar Prasad

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on the atlas — 102

highlights — 24

  • But the quality of polypragmosyne permeates your entire being; if you want to do this one thing, you have to do many things. More than that, you need to become the man who does things all the time. Nietzsche talks about Achille’s or Hector’s “action” as if the action of Hector was Hector himself, completely swallowed by his nature, having no other choice but to insist upon himself. In the case of Odysseus, his nature is polypragmon and polytropos. It takes no effort for Odysseus to be Odysseus.
    You can just things - by Hyde - BreatheLess
  • By default, the mind becomes stuck to mental representations that have more to do with our desires than how things really are. This leads to aversive experiences of emptiness, hopelessness, worthlessness, helplessness when we bump into evidence about how confused we are. We come up with plans for avoiding these experiences, but these plans don’t really work, leading us to repeatedly encounter flashes of the undesired experiences. Our response is to try to push on the plans even harder, which doesn’t work. But once we get wise to this process we can incline in the opposite direction, pushing le…
    Neurotic Gradient Descent: (mis)Translating the Buddha
  • Finally, I think we could get deep insight into the nature of the culture war: we might productively model politics, and all ideological conflict, as a vicious battle over the valence of these ‘felt senses’ and the logic of how they combine. Competing memeplexes have deep incompatibilities between their internal ‘felt-sense arithmetic’, which effectively constitute their boundaries and axis of conflict. Ontological holy war is about degrading the other side’s ability to think complex and/or adversarial thoughts, by desecrating and warping the meanings of their words, fragmenting the ‘key signa…
    A Future for Neuroscience · opentheory.net
  • The problem facing neuroscience in 2018 is that we have a lot of experimental knowledge about how neurons work– and we have a lot of observational knowledge about how people behave– but we have few elegant compressions for how to connect the two. CSHW promises to do just that, to be a bridge from bottom-up neural dynamics - things we can measure - to high-level psychological/phenomenological/psychiatric phenomena - things we care about. And a bottom-up bridge like this should also allow continuous improvement as our understanding of the fundamentals improve, as well as significant unification …
    A Future for Neuroscience · opentheory.net
  • What is it about equanimity that is so helpful for investigation? One way to think about it is that being non-judgemental about what you're seeing is exactly the attitude you'd want from an investigator. An investigator who was already sure about what he was seeing and what it meant would be an inquisitor. Secondly, when equanimous, mental events happen, and then, importantly, stop. They don't keep daisy chaining to the next thought with your knee jerk reaction to the previous one. This is helpful when trying to figure out what's happening moment to moment.
    Neurotic Gradient Descent: There are only a few suttas where the Buddha directly discusses technique, the Saṅkhitta Dhamma Sutta is one of them
  • Anecdotally, the phenomenology of love-annealing is the object ‘feels beautiful from all angles’. This may imply that things (ideas, patterns, people) which are more internally coherent & invariant across contexts can produce stronger annealing effects – i.e. these things are more easy to fall deeply in love with given the same ‘annealing budget’, and this love is more durable.
    The Neuroscience of Meditation: Four Models · opentheory.net
  • Very speculatively, perhaps we could use alexithymia (‘missing emotions’) as a target model for getting rid of the various ‘defilements’ Buddhism talks about. E.g., if the brain can’t resonate to the harmonics which characterize anger, it can’t be angry. Or we could go the other way and tune the brain to resonate more easily to the characteristic harmonics of loving kindness.
    The Neuroscience of Meditation: Four Models · opentheory.net
  • “Nobody ever gave anything to me,” he said, as the priest refilled his soup bowl and added an extra slice of bread.
    Being John Rawls - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
  • Also, Tocqueville argues that the replacement of the ancient system of fair feudal privileges and duties with one of authoritarian enforced obedience led to the French Revolution, and I’m not sure what the parenting equivalent would be but it sounds bad.
    Chip Off The Old Block
  • If you want to prompt someone to be authentic and playful and generative, you usually just need to ask them something where they have a rich experience to pull from but have never pulled an answer from that experience before. If you ask two or three increasingly detailed questions about something they tell you, you get there.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • If people’s decisions are not randomly irrational, but systematically irrational in predictable ways, that raises the possibility that people who are aware of these irrationalities may be able to do better than the average person in particular fields where the irrationalities are more common, raising the possibility that paternalism can sometimes be justified.
    [REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ | Slate Star Codex
  • These people’s psychopolitics focus almost entirely on cutting down Tall Poppies, and on pre-emptively salting any soil that might one day allow a Tall Poppy to grow. An optimist might say this is because their first commitment is to the ultimate equality of humankind, beyond any commitment to short-term material welfare.
    Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
  • They worshiped [conquering Spartan general Lysander] as a god…not because he spared them but because he was powerful, took away their power and also flattered them, let them believe they had fooled him into thinking they were worth sparing - all of those words are correct, that’s what they wanted from their omnipotent god. He let the people who wanted no part of responsibility for their state take credit for its past while having little they could do but obey. He took their hubris and massaged it into pride, he let them take pride in their hubris and - and they started masturbating ferociously…
    Book Review: Sadly, Porn - by Scott Alexander
  • 2.5: Maybe morality is true because you can logically prove it is true David Hume noted that it is impossible to prove “should" statements from “is" statements. One can make however many statements about physical facts of the world: fire is hot, hot things burn you, burning people makes their skin come off - and one can combined them into other statements of physical fact, such as “If fire is hot, and hot things burn you, then fire will burn you", and yet from these statements alone you can never prove “therefore, you shouldn't set people on fire" unless you've already got a should statement l…
    Consequentialism FAQ
  • I like the strategy game Civilization, where you play as a group of primitives setting out to found a empire. You build cities and infrastructure, research technologies, and fight wars. Your world is filled with several (usually 2 to 7) other civilizations trying to do the same. Just like in the real world, civilizations must decide between Guns and Butter. The Civ version of Guns is called the Axe Rush. You immediately devote all your research to discovering how to make really good axes, all your industry to manufacturing those axes, and all your population into wielding those axes. Then you …
    Studies On Slack | Slate Star Codex
  • Equivalence adjustment accounts for the fact that larger families need more total income but less per capita income than smaller families because they can share resources and take advantage of economies of scale.
    A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
  • Director's law states that the bulk of public programs are designed primarily to benefit the middle classes, but are financed by taxes paid primarily by the upper and lower classes.
    Director's_law
  • In fact, protection agencies have a strong incentive to make everybody as scared of crime as possible, and in fact to raise the actual crime rate if they can, in order to get people to buy their Premium plan. Given that this is anarcho-capitalism and there are no laws against crime, this can’t possibly end well.
    Book Review: The Machinery Of Freedom | Slate Star Codex
  • Although the areas of evolution, history, and child development have different time scales, research in these domains seems to converge on the notion that transcending the present requires and is enabled by the human capacity for abstract mental representation.
    Near-Far Summary - by Robin Hanson - Overcoming Bias
  • Many recent writers have taken utilitarianism to be indifferent about the distribution of welfare. Imagine a choice between an outcome where overall welfare is large but distributed unequally and an outcome where overall welfare is smaller but distributed equally. Utilitarians are taken to favor outcomes with greater overall welfare even if it is also less equally distributed. To illustrate this, let us take an artificially simple population, divided into just two groups. Units of welfare Total welfare for both groups Alternative 1 Per person Per group 10,000 people in group A 1 10,000 100,000…
    Rule Consequentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • I know a guy who constructed a 10-dimensional metric space for English words, then did PCA on it. There were only 4 significant components: good-bad, calm-exciting, open-closed, basic-elaborate. They accounted for 65%, 20%, 9%, and 5% of the variance in the 10-dimensional space, leaving 1% for everything else. This means that we need only 8 adjectives in English 99% of the time.
    The Trouble With "Good" — LessWrong
  • I mentioned politics briefly above, but they probably deserve more space here. Libertarian-minded people keep talking about how there’s too much red tape and the economy is being throttled. And less libertarian-minded people keep interpreting it as not caring about the poor, or not understanding that government has an important role in a civilized society, or as a “dog whistle” for racism, or whatever. I don’t know why more people don’t just come out and say “LOOK, REALLY OUR MAIN PROBLEM IS THAT ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS COST TEN TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO FOR NO REASON, PLUS THEY SEEM…
    Considerations On Cost Disease | Slate Star Codex
  • When her interviewers asked her to distinguish her treatment of “superior” people such as Howard Roark and Henry Rearden from Nietzsche’s discussions of the superior individual, she had this to say: [I]t’s and equivocation on the word “superior.” If you mean “superior” in the sense of excellence – and “superior is a bad word to use here – if you mean that some men excel, are better, than others, by means of self-developed, self-made virtue, that is a different thing entirely than Nietzsche’s concept, which divided men in effect into two species. You see, the word “superior” is more applicable …
    Lester Hunt's Web Page - Ayn Rand's Evolving View of Friedrich Nietzsche
  • That said, you can defend that there exists a general moral duty to help the poor, but not because they deserve it, but just because it is good to help others, and doing more good is better than doing less good, so if you are going to dedicate resources to helping others, if you target the poor you will get lots of helping done.
    Nintil - The Non-Non-Libertarian FAQ